Courtesy photoDr. Patrik Brundin, of the Van Andel Institute, was involved in research testing the effect of transplanted stem cells on Huntington's disease.

GRAND RAPIDS, MI – Van Andel Institute researchers who took part in a new study investigating how Parkinson’s disease develops in the brain hope the findings will one day lead to drugs to slow the progression of symptoms.

The study published this week shows, for the first time, that a protein that is misfolded in Parkinson’s patients spreads from the olfactory bulb - a part of the brain involved in the sense of smell - to other brain regions. When the misfolded protein was injected into the olfactory bulb of mice, it quickly moved to other areas of the brain.

The findings are important in light of other research into the appearance of clumps of the protein, a-synuclein, in the brain, the Van Andel Institute researchers said in a statement. They appear to affect some areas, such as the nose and the gut, earlier and other areas later. A poor sense of smell often is one of the first symptoms of Parkinson’s, the second most common neurodegenerative disease after Alzheimer's.

“A major unmet medical need is a therapy that slows disease progression," said Dr. Patrik Brundin, who leads Parkinson’s research at VAI and is senior author of the study. "We hope an understanding of how (the protein) moves between brain regions will help uncover molecules that we can target with new drugs to slow the progression of symptoms in patients.”

The study involved researchers from Lund University in Sweden and Laboratoire d’Enzymologie et de Biochimie Structurale in France. It was published in the journal Acta Neuropathologica.